Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (21 page)

Under Knatz's regime, the Port of Los Angeles spent an average of a million dollars a day on maintenance, modernization, and upgrades. She likens a port to a bridge, like the George Washington or the Golden Gate, which must be painted regularly to protect the metal structures from corrosion but which are so huge and take so long to finish that, once a paint job is completed, it must start again almost immediately at the other end of the span. As part of this effort at upkeep, Knatz gradually swapped out old and dirty diesel-powered dockside machinery for handling and moving cargo in favor of motors that rely on natural gas, batteries, or other lower-emissions technology.

The third and most contentious measure the twin ports initiated during Knatz's time in office was a clean-trucks program that phased out older, heavily polluting big rigs that served the ports as drayage vehicles. Dray trucks—the term dates back to horse-drawn, open-sided carts for hauling goods short distances—fetch containers at the port and move them to nearby warehouses, rail yards, and other intermodal terminals, where the container goods are unpacked, sorted, repacked, and handed over to longer-range shippers for transport to the actual cargo owners. Drayage is an essential but troubled leg in the consumer supply chain, with the drivers often paid and treated poorly, working as contractors
rather than employees, many of them owner-operators driving older—and dirtier—vehicles.

Trucking and retail trade associations tried to block the clean-trucks program, but their lobbying and lawsuits failed to halt the phasing out of old dirty trucks. By 2012, no trucks from before the 2007 model year could operate at the port, and the diesel emissions throughout the area measurably lessened.

Other players in the port ecosystem were more supportive than the drayage companies and truckers of the changes. The shipping lines, whose single greatest expense is fuel, were looking for new efficiencies anyway, and cold-ironing could be a money saver for them in the long term. The terminal operators who receive the goods coming off the ships were sick of lawsuits over environmental concerns halting their expansion plans and saw the green-ports initiative as a means of relieving the bottleneck—an investment that would pay dividends by allaying community concerns and allowing more growth. The longshoremen's union and local communities were pleased because they saw direct improvements in working and living conditions. Neighborhoods near the ports worried less about respiratory disease and elevated rates of childhood asthma. Environmental critics praised the transformation. Dockworkers experienced the greatest relief. Many had spent their careers working in choking fumes, their clothes black with diesel particulate at the end of the day. Crane operators, hovering over the ship's exhaust stacks as they lifted out cargo, had inhaled the stuff all day long. “They want to earn a good living,” the union president told Knatz at the outset of the green program. “They do not want to pay with their lives for a stronger economy.”

There were concerns about the cost of going green in the short term, but these were balanced against long-term gains in fuel savings and lower maintenance costs. Instead of driving business
off to other ports, as was initially feared might occur, the green programs won international praise and inspired similar reforms worldwide.

There were other threats to the ports and, by extension, the whole goods-movement system, against which Knatz knew any tussles over the green-ports initiatives paled by comparison. The port and its transportation connections to the rest of the world were facing overload with a public that neither understood nor felt sympathy for the port's needs. Modern Los Angeles has always styled itself as the headquarters for beaches, surfing, movies, and television—the capital of car culture, the center of sprawl, the home of Hollywood. But the host city to the biggest seaport complex on the continent, the spout through which so much of the consumer economy pours, has never viewed itself as a port town. In short, Knatz had to get the message out: another project of the magnitude of the Alameda Corridor was needed—and probably more than one—and for that she needed allies. That's when she turned to the LOLs.

T
he fifty or so members of the Ladies of Logistics call themselves a social group. They're women at work in the male-dominated logistics world who get together for power walks and potlucks and Geraldine Knatz's famous bake-offs—and for networking.

Transportation, so often referred to as a “system,” is dizzyingly fragmented. Its leaders, workers, and innovators occupy their own silos, laying their plans and setting them in motion for bigger vessels or new distribution centers or expanded freight yards all according to their own individual needs, often with little or no input or consideration of other elements in the supply chain. But when a group of LOLs gathers, they bring together top transportation executives across all modes and industries:
rails, roads, ships, retail, academia, real estate. Among them are developers and owners of warehouses and distribution centers; members of the California Transportation Commission and the National Freight Advisory Committee; the vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association; a leader from the longshoremen's union; the head of the Coast Guard's Los Angeles command; leaders of chambers of commerce; and other major players in ports and government.

When the vice president for government affairs at the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway faced protests and lawsuits against a proposed new freight yard, dubbed the Southern California International Gateway, her fellow LOLs—Knatz and Elizabeth Warren, who leads a harbor business association called FuturePorts—spoke out publicly to support the plan. It would be a benefit to the entire regional transportation system, these Ladies of Logistics argued to a skeptical public, easing congestion by replacing trucks on the freeway with boxcars on rails, lowering pollution, making goods movement—and therefore the goods themselves—cheaper for all. Later, when a port terminal expansion plan Knatz coveted aroused neighborhood concerns about traffic and property values, the LOLs from local universities appeared with data showing economic growth and jobs in the community tied directly to growth at the port.

Fran Inman, senior vice president of Majestic Realty and appointee to the National Freight Advisory Committee, brings to Washington the views of all the LOLs. Her own perspective is unique: Inman's company is the largest private industrial real estate owner in the U.S. and warehouse landlord to such diverse tenants as Amazon, General Electric, In-N-Out Burger, Walmart, and Crayola. She found that many people are fond of saying the transportation system is broken, but the real problem is that it's invisible. “When it's working, which is most of the time, no one
pays attention,” she complained at one LOLs event. “People tune in only when something's not working.”

As she became immersed in transportation policy, Inman was flabbergasted to learn that America has no national goods-movement strategy. Knatz told her other countries are surging ahead of the U.S. on this score, particularly in marketing their seaports as alternatives to Los Angeles and Long Beach. “Canada has an entire national freight strategy worked out,” she said. “And their strategy is to steal my business.”

The LOLs cut across all parts of the transportation system, and because many of them have projects that require public approval, they spend a good deal of their time
explaining
to politicians and public why ports and trains and all the myriad projects that advance or maintain movement matter. As a result, for a “social group,” the LOLs have amassed considerable clout. It's hard to go to a major transportation meeting or conference without bumping into a few of them—or hearing them mentioned and thanked by name by legislators or congressional committee chairmen, who had at one time or another turned to the LOLs to find the right data or the right experts or to drum up support for a highway project or port expansion or rail safety bill.

Their work has led to the near completion of a unified freight policy at the national and California state level—a means of prioritizing (and paying for) improvements that will have the most impact. They also were instrumental in the launch of Knatz's last big project at the port before leaving her post
²³
: revitalization of the Port of Los Angeles's waterfront as a center of dining, shopping, and commerce, as it was in decades past. The plan includes Knatz's legacy project, the $500 million port business and scientific research center called AltaSea. She believes this project may finally convince Los Angeles that it really is a port town and generate the innovations needed to solve the opposing problems of
insufficient capacity and too much environmental impact. Knatz would have liked to have stayed on a few years longer to work on this under the new mayor, she says. But now her successors—Gene Seroka, the former shipping line executive now running the Port of Los Angeles, and Jon Slangerup, who ran Federal Express Canada before taking over the Port of Long Beach—are grappling with the overload caused by megaships and their mega-alliances on one side, while on the other, lawsuits and public opposition to building more rail yards and freeway capacity for freight moving in and out of the port. Communities that will have to live near any new infrastructure—and cope with the fumes, noise, and health effects—insist that they will withdraw their opposition only if the new trucks and trains, as well as the powerful machines and vehicles that load them, use clean, low-, and zero-emissions technology. The ports themselves are already making such a shift, but the private rail and trucking companies responsible for the logistics outside the ports' gates say they can only clean up slowly because of the cost. And so the impasse continues.

Being part of the LOLs, hearing the diverse concerns of port workers, railroad leaders, activists, and shipping companies made clear to Knatz why the door-to-door machinery that ought to function as a seamless system so frequently succumbs to paralysis instead of building consensus when it comes to reducing overload. The absence of an overarching national strategy combines with lack of public understanding to create failure after failure. Traffic lane expansions that don't fix car traffic are celebrated, funded, and built, even as highway connectors and new rail gateways that would reduce truck congestion and pollution are opposed and languish for decades. Auto safety recalls that save hundreds of lives on the road receive the highest priority, but fundamentally flawed system designs that kill tens of thousands of Americans every year are blandly accepted as the cost of doing
business. Massive warehouse builders are courted and given tax breaks by communities eager for jobs and growth, and then those same communities complain when truck traffic and smog triples overnight. The costs of these disconnects have been ignored and papered over for decades, the LOLs say, but they are now reaching a critical mass. And nowhere is this more visible than at the ports.

There are the new, larger ships with cargo capability beyond even the massive Port of Los Angeles's current capacity to handle—requiring yet more expansion and construction. There are the shipping line alliances that save the steamship companies money by pooling resources but throw everything else out of kilter because of the crazy mix of cargo stacked together on single ships. It's as if Federal Express and UPS tossed all their stuff on a single truck to save money, then brought it all to a U.S. Postal Service warehouse to sort, where havoc predictably ensues. These changes have saved shipping lines fuel and money, but they have also created backlogs and congestion at ports worldwide, with port directors caught in the middle. Suddenly the natural allies of shipper and port are at odds, with no easy solution in sight. The rest of the transportation system has to suck it up and try to solve the problem the shipping lines created.

Then there is the melting Arctic that is beginning to alter long-established trade routes by opening once ice-clogged routes at the top of the world. In a few years, these new routes will send even more cargo streaming into the West Coast ports. Finally, there is the constant need to modernize and automate the movement of cargo from ship to shore and to and from the port, set against the need to keep peace with labor forces that can make or break a port's rankings in the world.

Preparing for these threats and disruptions requires something else: getting public buy-in. Knatz had to grapple with public indifference and ignorance of how transportation works and
why it matters—and how there's more to the door-to-door world than long commutes and rush hour traffic. She realized just how fundamental and dangerous a problem she and every other port director faced early in her tenure when, during a hearing on the proposed expansion of a port terminal, a member of the public objected on the grounds that the project would generate more truck trips on already crowded freeways.

“Why do I need a port?” the woman asked. “I have Walmart.”

There were murmurs of agreement from an audience that felt that these trucks were indeed deplorable, their presence a barrier to the travels and commerce of “real people.” They had no idea that the two things were so intimately connected, Knatz realized then: how the shoes that woman was wearing were almost certainly made in China. Or that a majority of shoes from China moved through her port. Or that there was an entire web of connections, from a rail trans-loading terminal south of Los Angeles, to a freight yard outside Kansas City, to a truck depot in the heartland, all of which were absolutely critical in maintaining a world where an annoyed consumer can say, “I have Walmart.” Indeed, it was this woman's consumer choices—and those of a couple hundred million more Americans like her—that drew the ships and trucks to the port in the first place. That woman, Knatz felt like blurting, wasn't the victim. She was the cause.

“People just have no idea,” she said later. “They don't make the connection.”